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Sauce

To Make Sauce for the Cod's Head

A sauce made from lobster, sea salt, melted butter, lemon pickle, walnut catsup, lemon slice, horse-radish, mace, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Horse and radish work together. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and 528 recipes mention both. Both carry 1-hexanol, which smells resin, flower. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: milk, tree nuts, shellfish (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Prepare the lobster

  1. Stick a skewer in the vent of the lobster's tail to keep water out.

  2. Boil water with a handful of salt; add the lobster and boil for 30 minutes.

  3. Remove any spawn from the lobster and pound it finely in a mortar.

Make the sauce

  1. Mix the pounded spawn with melted butter.

  2. Pull the lobster meat into bits and add to the butter along with lemon pickle, walnut catsup, lemon slice, horse-radish, and ground mace.

  3. Boil the mixture for one minute, then remove the horse-radish and lemon.

Serve

  1. Serve the sauce in a sauceboat.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Horse + radishtop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together528 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanol (resin, flower).

  2. Meat + walnuttop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,034 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3,5-trimethylpyrazine (cocoa, roasted).

  3. Lobster + meattop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together909 recipes
  4. Butter + walnuttop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together6,819 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Lemon + walnuttop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together2,149 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Lobster
Supplies the meat and spawn that give the sauce its body and rich seafood flavour.
Melted butter
Carries the flavours and gives the sauce a smooth, rich texture.
Lemon pickle
Adds sharp acidity and tang that cut through the richness of the butter.
Walnut catsup
Contributes a dark, savoury depth of flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Pounding the spawn finely. Fine pounding breaks the spawn into a smooth paste that blends evenly into the butter. Coarse pieces would leave a grainy texture in the finished sauce.

Flavor stand-ins for the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lobster, butter, meat, lemon, walnut, horse, radish):

  1. Parsleybetter flavor fit
  2. Celerybetter flavor fit
  3. Thymebetter flavor fit
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lobster, butter, meat, lemon, walnut, horse, radish. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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